A couple of weeks ago I saw Inside Out, the new Pixar/Disney animated film. It was wonderful – funny, moving, intellectually stimulating, emotionally rich and visually beautiful. Today I came across Disney again, in a report noting that Anna and Elsa from Frozen are being used to help inspire girls to take up coding. There are many ways to engage with Disney, and it has been co-opted for many causes.
But around the same time I saw Inside Out I read ‘Archives and Museums – threat or opportunity?’ by Matthew Jones (1997), which included the following.
Maybe there is a Disney equivalent to Godwin’s Law: as any discussion of popularity, audience size and culture grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Disney or Disneyland approaches 1. (If I’m the first one to suggest such a thing, it seems only appropriate to call it Mickey’s Law.) It’s certainly a comparison I’ve seen many times.
As I asked on Twitter at the time, what might an archival service ‘akin to a Disney theme-park’ look like? It’s interesting to consider whether such a thing is even possible. If it is, what would this do for the public perception of archives, their use and the community’s understanding of their work? And what would it do to archives and the archival profession?
Whatever the answer – thoughts welcome in the comments – the Disney analogy is a lazy one. The company has been used as part of many social debates (see Best and Lowney 2009), but the most common is also the most simplistic: they are homogenised, mass market, corporate, socially conservative, and more.
This somewhat one dimensional view of Disney was used to critique the revamp of New York’s Times Square with a Disney store at its heart. The critique accompanies a kind of romantic nostalgia for ‘old New York’. But the New York Times notes that, while many complained of the ‘Disneyfication’ of Times Square, this criticism “sometimes loses sight of the fact that it was the Walt Disney Company, perhaps more than any other, that helped start the turnaround” from a time “when pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts and dope pushers prowled Times Square and the Deuce, as that stretch of 42nd Street was known. The number of tourists is up 74 percent since 1993, to an estimated 36.5 million last year, and attendance at Broadway shows has soared to nearly 12 million” (Bagli 2010).
Similarly, wheeling Disney into a debate about archives (and other GLAM organisations) fails to consider whether there are aspects of a such a large, successful organisation we could learn from in the way we engage people and communicate with diverse audiences. What does Disney actually stand for? Sure, they are heavily commercial and an international corporation with a strong profit motive. But to much of the community they are popular and widely known. Equally, they are open to critique for representations of race, gender roles, cultural difference and more. They have worked hard to address at least some of these issues, continually broadening their cross-generational, cross-cultural appeal.
Can archives say the same?
When I say I am an archivist the most common reaction is: what’s an archivist? If we surveyed 1,000 people at random on the social value of archives and the social value of Disney, how would the responses compare? I have been brought to tears by the content of archival records and the people to whom they are important, just as I have been brought to tears by Disney films, but how many in the community could say the same? (Many more since Who Do You Think You Are? than before it, I would guess. How do shows like this, with their reliance on celebrity, fit with the Disney analogy?)
Archives are not Disney, and never will be. But we need to be careful not to write off left field or straight out populist approaches to increasing the profile and reach of our work. Returning to Jones, he notes that some archivists take a position that “assumes that archives can never be relevant in the modern world and that to try to be relevant is to endanger the archive community” (Jones 1997). If there are archivists who still think this in 2015 I hope they are considering retirement. Archives, just like Inside Out, are wonderful – funny, moving, intellectually stimulating, emotionally rich and visually beautiful. We need to do better at letting the world know, drawing on inspiration from museums and galleries, from historical fiction, from television, and if it works, even from Disney.
Bagli, Charles V., ‘Times Square Redevelopment is Complete,’ The New York Times (3 December 2010). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/nyregion/04square.html (accessed: 5 August 2015)
Best, Joel, and Kathleen S. Lowney, ‘The Disadvantage of a Good Reputation: Disney as a Target for Social Problems Claims,’ The Sociological Quarterly, 50:3 (2009), 431-449.
Jones, Matthew, ‘Archives and museums – threat or opportunity?’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 18:1 (1997), 27-35.
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